This American food trivia quiz has 50 free questions with answers and covers the dishes the United States invented, adopted or argued about: the burger's four rival birthplaces, the Buffalo bar that fried the first wings, the Philadelphia hot dog stand that switched to steak, the salad created in Mexico for thirsty Prohibition-era Americans, and the canned meat Hawaii buys seven million tins of a year. It runs through regional classics (barbecue styles, Cincinnati chili, po' boys, Hot Browns, clam chowder), snack-aisle icons (Oreos, Twinkies, Cracker Jack, tater tots), holiday food (Thanksgiving turkey and the casserole from a soup company test kitchen), and Chinese-American and Tex-Mex dishes with surprising origins. Easy questions sit next to genuinely hard ones, and each shows its difficulty. Every answer has been checked against a primary reference and each question carries its citation, so the origin stories here are the documented ones, not the ones on the diner placemat.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Buffalo wings were first fried up in 1964 at which Buffalo, New York bar?
Anchor Bar
Teressa Bellissimo, who owned the bar with her husband Frank, is credited with the idea. The classic sauce is Frank's RedHot, butter and vinegar, and the wings have nothing to do with the animal.
Q 02What did Pat and Harry Olivieri sell from their stand before inventing the Philly cheesesteak?
Hot dogs
Pat's King of Steaks still operates, and its customers overwhelmingly pick Cheez Whiz over American or provolone. You order 'wit' or 'witout' onions.
Q 03The Caesar salad, a fixture of American menus, was actually created on July 4, 1924 in which city?
Tijuana
Italian immigrant Caesar Cardini ran a restaurant there serving Americans dodging Prohibition. His daughter insisted the original had Worcestershire sauce but no anchovies.
Q 04Which company introduced Spam on July 5, 1937?
Hormel
Ken Daigneau, the brother of an executive, won $100 for the name. Hawaii buys about seven million cans a year, and there is a Spam Museum in Austin, Minnesota.
Q 05Which US state has the highest per-capita consumption of Spam, at around seven million cans a year?
Hawaii
Spam musubi, a slice of the meat on rice wrapped in nori, is a local staple. The military took delivery of over 150 million pounds of it during World War II.
Q 06In which country did Ignacio Anaya invent nachos in 1943 for US military wives from Fort Duncan?
Mexico
He fried tortilla triangles, topped them with shredded Colby cheese and pickled jalapeños, and called them 'Nacho's Special' after his own nickname. October 21 is the International Day of the Nacho.
Q 07Deep-dish pizza was invented in 1943 at which Windy City restaurant?
Pizzeria Uno
Founders Ike Sewell and Richard Riccardo get the credit, though their chef Rudy Malnati may deserve it. The cheese goes under the chunky tomato sauce, not on top.
Q 08White Castle, credited as the first fast-food hamburger chain, opened in 1921 in which city?
Wichita, Kansas
Billy Ingram and Walter Anderson started with $700 and sold their square sliders for five cents. Time magazine named the slider the most influential burger of all time in 2014.
Q 09Fortune cookies most likely originated with immigrants to America from which country?
Japan
Claimants include Makoto Hagiwara of San Francisco's Japanese Tea Garden and David Jung of Los Angeles. When the biggest US maker tried selling them in China in 1992 they were rejected as too American.
Q 10Which dessert did Florida designate its official state pie in 2006?
Key lime pie
A proper one is pale yellow, not green, because ripe Key limes are yellow. In 1965 a state legislator proposed a $100 fine for anyone advertising a version made without Key limes; the bill failed.
Q 11The banana split was created in 1904 by a 23-year-old pharmacy apprentice in which Pennsylvania town?
Latrobe
David 'Doc' Strickler's original had one scoop each of vanilla, chocolate and strawberry. Wilmington, Ohio disputes the claim, but the National Ice Cream Retailers Association sided with Pennsylvania in 2004.
Q 12Per the Omaha origin story, the Reuben sandwich was invented for a poker game at which establishment?
Blackstone Hotel
New York's Arnold Reuben of Reuben's Delicatessen has a rival claim. Because it pairs corned beef with Swiss cheese, the sandwich is not kosher despite its deli pedigree.
Q 13The Cobb salad is named after the owner of which Hollywood restaurant?
The Brown Derby
Q 21Which ingredient, widely rumoured to be in Cincinnati chili, is not actually used by any of the city's parlors?
Chocolate
The real warm-spice profile comes from cinnamon, allspice, cloves, cumin and nutmeg. Skyline and Gold Star are the two big chains.
Q 22Which US president served 'a pie called macaroni' at a state dinner in 1802?
Thomas Jefferson
His enslaved chef James Hemings may have picked up the recipe in France. Kraft's boxed version arrived in 1937 promising a meal for four in nine minutes.
Q 23Which country buys nearly a quarter of the Kraft macaroni and cheese sold worldwide?
Canada
There it is called Kraft Dinner, and one writer has argued it outranks poutine as the national dish.
Robert Howard Cobb supposedly threw it together from kitchen leftovers late one night in 1937. The chopped ingredients are laid out in neat rows.
Q 14Roughly how many hot dogs do Americans eat each year?
20 billion
About a third are eaten in summer. Charles Feltman started boiling sausages from a cart on Coney Island in 1867, and Joey Chestnut's contest record is 83 in ten minutes.
Q 15Which condiment is famously never put on a Chicago-style hot dog 'dragged through the garden'?
Ketchup
A proper Chicago dog gets mustard, tomatoes, onions, sport peppers, bright green relish, a pickle spear and celery salt on a poppy-seed bun.
Q 16North of the US border, corn dogs are commonly known by which brand name?
Pogo
Back in the US, Cozy Dog Drive-In in Springfield, Illinois claims the first corn dog on a stick in 1946, while Pronto Pup in Oregon dates its claim to 1939.
Q 17Which frozen-food company created Tater Tots in 1953 to use up leftover slivers of cut potato?
Ore-Ida
Founders Nephi and Golden Grigg found the name in a thesaurus. In Minnesota the tots go on top of a ground-beef casserole known as hotdish.
Q 18In which state is barbecue almost exclusively pork, with vinegar sauce in the east and mustard further south?
North Carolina
Whole-hog Carolina barbecue is considered the starting point of the whole American tradition. Kansas City goes thick and tomato-based across beef, pork and lamb; Central Texas is all about brisket.
Q 19Which barbecue city is best known for pork ribs served either 'wet' or 'dry'?
Memphis
Dry means a spice rub with no sauce; wet means basted before and after cooking. Memphians also put pulled pork on things like pizza and nachos.
Q 20In Cincinnati's famous parlors, what does ordering a 'three-way' get you?
Spaghetti, chili and cheese
Add onions or beans for a four-way, both for a five-way. The Kiradjieff brothers, immigrants from Macedonia, started serving it in 1922 with a cinnamon-and-allspice-spiced sauce.
Q 24Green bean casserole was created in 1955 in whose corporate test kitchen?
Campbell Soup
Dorcas Reilly's recipe now accounts for about 40 percent of all cream of mushroom soup sold in the US. She donated the original recipe card to the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2002.
Q 25Since 1989, what traditionally happens to the turkey presented to the president each November?
It is given a mock pardon
The pardoned birds are sent off to live out their usually short natural lives at a farm or park. Americans spent $983 million on Thanksgiving turkeys in 2024.
Q 26What flavour was the original Twinkie filling when James Dewar invented the snack cake in 1930?
Banana cream
Wartime banana rationing forced a switch to vanilla that stuck. The name came from a St. Louis billboard for Twinkle Toe Shoes.
Q 27The Oreo, launched by Nabisco in 1912, was an imitation of which earlier cream-filled sandwich cookie?
Hydrox
Sunshine's original dates to 1908 but lost the war for shelf space. Oreo has been the world's best-selling cookie brand since 2014, and Double Stuf arrived in 1974.
Q 28Cracker Jack was first shown to the public at a world's fair in which city in 1893?
Chicago
Brothers Frederick and Louis Rueckheim made it; the prize in every box started in 1912 and Sailor Jack and his dog Bingo arrived around 1916. Food historian Andrew F. Smith calls it the first junk food.
Q 29In what year did Cracker Jack start putting a prize in every box?
1912
Physical toys were replaced with digital game codes in 2016. The snack had already been immortalised in 'Take Me Out to the Ball Game'.
Q 30Which style of clam chowder is made with a clear broth, containing no milk, butter or tomatoes?
Rhode Island
New England's is cream-based, Manhattan's is red with tomatoes, and all three usually come with oyster crackers.